I Dont know if this is the general place for this or not. I cant seem to find a specific forum for the asrock 330 and im at a complete loss as where to start.

Heres my situation, I currently have a popcorn hour a110 which i think is great apart from the time it takes to verify and unrar large downloaded .mkvs (which is mainly all i use). This is why im looking at a asrock 330.

My current setup using the popcorn hour uses NZBGet which is pretty much downloading constantly. Its set up so that it checks newzbin every 30 mins and downloads any bookmarks i have. This means that when im at work or whatever i can look on nezbin on my phone, add a new film i fancy to my bookmark then when i come home its downloaded and extracted, ready to watch.

Here are my questions:

Im looking at at asrock 330, but despite using telnet a few times, i have no grasp of linux. Id be looking on instaling XBMC live, how easy/hard is this? What is the general upkeep like? Would it be too much for someone with no linux experience?

Ive seen a script (SABNZBD) which looks to do exactly what im doing now (ie downloading/extracting from newzbin). Can this be installed ontop of xbmc live? or would i need to install a full linux os to be able to do this?

Any idea of the verifying/extracting times of say a 1080p 10gig .mkv? On my popcorn this can take 2-6 hours, sometimes longer. Will it be greatly improved?

I wont be using any NAS/network, everything will be self contained. How easy is it to insert a new HDD? I'd be looking at maybe a 1-2TB depending on price. Do 3.5" HDD's fit?

Finally, how does XBMC work? My current YAMJ jukebox i think is great (moviewall skin) but the downside is ive got to run a program from my pc to update it with any new films. Ive seen AEON skin and it looks better than my current one, does this automatically update new films and download fanart/synopsis etc or again does this need to be run externally from a main pc?

Any help greatly appreciated, trying to find a general starting place is going right over my head! To sum up, something that looks good and has the ability to remotely download and unrar nzbs is all im after, preferably alot quicker than my popcorn hour!

you didn't spend much time in the forum, did ya? so why should we waste our time to walk you through again? all of your questions can be answerd within 2-3 hours of reading i guess. and besides that wou yould allready have the knowledge to build a machine yourself.

to give you a short answers, yes i would prefer a 330 over the popcorn hour. ill bet it would be a big improvement to your setup. ans since im using some similar setup i can say my machine unrars that mkv in about 5-10 minutes...

No need to be a dick. If you don't want to answer someone's questions, just ignore the post.

In order:

It's not particularly difficult, but there are some gotchas if you have no linux experience. Expect to spend some time puzzling your way through various FAQs and HOWTOs.

I don't know anything about your particular usenet download scheme, but if it says it works on linux it should work. It would not be integrated into XBMC, of course.

XBMC can play RAR'd movies without extracting them first, as long as they don't use RAR compression. Releases aren't compressed, so it works great. I've never run into a RAR'd movie that wouldn't play. Of course if you prefer to unrar them for whatever reason, even a piddly atom CPU will go a lot faster than the popcornhour integrated computer on a chip.

The asrock330 takes a 2.5" laptop drive internally. The biggest one you can find is around 640MB. Of course it will work with NAS and external (eSATA/USB) drives too.

XBMC works great, as far as the user experience goes it obliterates everything else.

johhhnnn Wrote:Im looking at at asrock 330, but despite using telnet a few times, i have no grasp of linux. Id be looking on instaling XBMC live, how easy/hard is this? What is the general upkeep like? Would it be too much for someone with no linux experience?

You should expect to spend some time reading guides, FAQs etc. I'd set off an entire weekend just go nuts. Break it as many times as you need to get comfortable with Linux. Only then start organizing your movie collection and stuff. It's sad to loose all that work because you did something wrong to the OS.

Just like with any other OS, you CAN break it, and sometimes it's easier to just start over than to find out how to fix it.

johhhnnn Wrote:Ive seen a script (SABNZBD) which looks to do exactly what im doing now (ie downloading/extracting from newzbin). Can this be installed ontop of xbmc live? or would i need to install a full linux os to be able to do this?

It can't be installed on top of XBMC Live. Maybe there are addons that allows you to interact with it - I've got no idea. Personally I don't use usenet.

There is however nothing preventing you from installing any application besides XBMC you'd like.

johhhnnn Wrote:Any idea of the verifying/extracting times of say a 1080p 10gig .mkv? On my popcorn this can take 2-6 hours, sometimes longer. Will it be greatly improved?

I don't know the Popcorn Hour specs, but I doubt it'll be as fast as the Atom 330 Processor. Especially if you smack it up to 2.1 GHz.

johhhnnn Wrote:I wont be using any NAS/network, everything will be self contained. How easy is it to insert a new HDD? I'd be looking at maybe a 1-2TB depending on price. Do 3.5" HDD's fit?

No, the system fits ONE (1) 2,5" Internal Harddrive (standard laptop harddisk). Those comes at a max of something like half a TB. I've got two external USB Drives connected adding up to a total of 2TB. Works great!

johhhnnn Wrote:Finally, how does XBMC work? My current YAMJ jukebox i think is great (moviewall skin) but the downside is ive got to run a program from my pc to update it with any new films. Ive seen AEON skin and it looks better than my current one, does this automatically update new films and download fanart/synopsis etc or again does this need to be run externally from a main pc?

Yes and no. The library updates when you ask it to (two clicks with the remove). It doesn't monitor for new files. However, if you've don't mind doing a bit of fiddling, you can call the update library function hourly with a cronjob or some other thing.

On my setup I've got a drop folder I throw things into, and a script automaticly identifies if it's a Movie or TV Show, and automaticly copies the file/directory to the proper location and asks XBMC to scrape it when it's done. Completely automated with RSS Feeds, Torrents and everything else. Quite lovely, but it requires some scripting knowledge to make it work.

johhhnnn Wrote:Any help greatly appreciated, trying to find a general starting place is going right over my head! To sum up, something that looks good and has the ability to remotely download and unrar nzbs is all im after, preferably alot quicker than my popcorn hour!

jonassw Wrote:It can't be installed on top of XBMC Live. Maybe there are addons that allows you to interact with it - I've got no idea. Personally I don't use usenet.

There is however nothing preventing you from installing any application besides XBMC you'd like.

This bit i dont get. If i install XBMC live can i install sabnzb aswell? Im not after intergration, if it runs completely separate and just drops files into a download folder that will be fine. Or can i only install sabnzb if i install full linux then install XBMC ontop of that?

I think what im trying to ask is - if you instal XBMC live, can you then instal other non-related linux programs to run alongside XBMC or is the only thing thats allowed to run XBMC?

johhhnnn Wrote:Guys, thanks for the replies. Some really helpful stuff.

This bit i dont get. If i install XBMC live can i install sabnzb aswell? Im not after intergration, if it runs completely separate and just drops files into a download folder that will be fine. Or can i only install sabnzb if i install full linux then install XBMC ontop of that?

I think what im trying to ask is - if you instal XBMC live, can you then instal other non-related linux programs to run alongside XBMC or is the only thing thats allowed to run XBMC?

Thanks again for your replies.

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, you can install any non-xbmc related software you'd like.

mojo6911 Wrote:That is false. XBMC Live is just a specialized version of Ubuntu. It will install fine.

Yes, you're ofcourse right.

I answered thinking he asked if it could be installed "inside XBMC", which it obviously can't. It can ofcourse run just fine beside XBMC on the XBMC Live (ubuntu) installation.

johhhnnn Wrote:My current setup using the popcorn hour uses NZBGet which is pretty much downloading constantly. Its set up so that it checks newzbin every 30 mins and downloads any bookmarks i have. This means that when im at work or whatever i can look on nezbin on my phone, add a new film i fancy to my bookmark then when i come home its downloaded and extracted, ready to watch.

...

Ive seen a script (SABNZBD) which looks to do exactly what im doing now (ie downloading/extracting from newzbin). Can this be installed ontop of xbmc live? or would i need to install a full linux os to be able to do this?

I assume you are running the NewzBook application on the popcornhour to check for bookmarks every 30 minutes? If so, the core bookmark checking functionality of NewzBook is similar to that of SABnzbd+, but some of the advanced features of NewzBook are not built into SABnzbd+ (eg. web/mobile newzbin search, file manager, media player, etc).

That being said, you could install NewzBook onto an XBMC machine (prerequisites being a httpd and PHP).

PS. I got fed-up with the popcornhour and all it's issues (including a crappy UI) and bought an Acer Revo AR1600 (+1 gig ram and IR), installed XBMC-Live on it, and I'm using it as my high definition multimedia center and I'm so happy I made the change. The PCH is now sitting in my bedroom and I'm tempted to throw it in a closet since I'm getting tired of all the noise it makes due to HDD spin-up/spin-down.

joshua.lyon Wrote:I assume you are running the NewzBook application on the popcornhour to check for bookmarks every 30 minutes? If so, the core bookmark checking functionality of NewzBook is similar to that of SABnzbd+, but some of the advanced features of NewzBook are not built into SABnzbd+ (eg. web/mobile newzbin search, file manager, media player, etc).

That being said, you could install NewzBook onto an XBMC machine (prerequisites being a httpd and PHP).

PS. I got fed-up with the popcornhour and all it's issues (including a crappy UI) and bought an Acer Revo AR1600 (+1 gig ram and IR), installed XBMC-Live on it, and I'm using it as my high definition multimedia center and I'm so happy I made the change. The PCH is now sitting in my bedroom and I'm tempted to throw it in a closet since I'm getting tired of all the noise it makes due to HDD spin-up/spin-down.

I went through the steps of installing SABnzbd+ on my XBMC Live machine (Revo) today and posted the instructions on my blog. Check out the post as it walks through step-by-step how to install and setup SABnzbd+ on XBMC Live.

See the note at the bottom for reference to an SABnzbd+ XBMC plugin which works directly within XBMC as well.